Catch Up! Chip In!

Sincephilosophical posts don’t age quickly, it’s not too late to catch up on some of my thought pieces featured on the blog the last week and a half. Here’s a handy compendium if you’re looking to make sure you didn’t miss anything:

First of course, there is the most sustained discussion in the blog’s history: The “Shane Series,” which I hope you take the time to see all the way through:

In Jon Stewart Against Dogma and Extremism But Not “Religion” I challenge the notion that religion is not a big deal as long as it helps you be a good person on the grounds that part of our ethical ideal should include a scrupulousness about beliefs that most forms of religious belief precludes.

Here is a very rough sketch on how I think Mark Sanford’s hypocrisy is intertangled with some sincerity which is what makes his behavior so unself-aware of late. Sincerity, Hypocrisy and Mark Sanford. I hope to develop my thoughts on hypocrisy down the road, much more carefully and systematically so I appreciate feedback on this first brief stab at it.

Here I think out loud in a rambling but hopefully thought provoking wrestle with the question of “moral facts”—whether they exist or not. My concern here is that there might be a difference between morally relevant truths which do exist and “moral facts” which do not.

In this post, I raise the news story about Sarkozy advocating that France ban burqas in public, ask for your views on the issue, sketch out some very powerful and influential views from Jonathan Haidt on moral psychology, and give some brief analysis of Haidt’s views in terms of my developing take on metaethics (which I take to be broadly Nietzschean.)

Here I play Sarkozy’s Advocate and offer possible arguments from within the terms of the logic of liberalism to ban the burqa in France.

In Why Worship Someone With Mysterious Motives? I piggy back on some insightful replies by the Conversational Atheist to Christian apologetics on the problem of evil, developing replies to further objections that I think might be raised to his position.

In this post, and then in this follow up to it, I explore the question of whether there is any such thing as “True Christianity” distinct from the history of the tradition that Christians can appeal to as the real thing, regardless of problems with the historical instantiations of the faith.

Then there are some rambling remarks as I try to grapple with Nietzsche’s harsh notion that our liberal Western traditions destroy the possibility for the kinds of expressions of freedom through which freedom is an actual power and mark of greatness and achievement in a human spirit.

Also remember to dig through the pages to find lots of interesting articles, videos, and audio clips from other people that you might have missed. There’s been a wealth of stuff I’ve found really fascinating this last week and a half.